Deciduous trees in southern Sweden : relevance, occurrence and future perspectives
Abstract: Deciduous trees in Europe’s hemi‐boreal forests are of major importance considering not only thebiodiversity tied to them and therefore their nature conservation values, but also due to theirrelevance for forest recreation, their role in mixed stands and in risk spreading when it comes toadopting forest ecosystems towards the expected climate change. For these reasons it seems alsoimportant to incorporate deciduous trees more into the forest management and its planning to beable to keep track of them as well as of their associated benefits. This thesis introduces the first stepstaken into that direction: after summarizing the importance of the deciduous species in Sweden’shemi‐boreal region it contains an GIS investigation of deciduous trees in Kronobergs län and finally asimulation illustrating the effects for production and biodiversity when increasing the deciduousshare in a forest landscape. The investigation has shown that the vast majority of the total deciduousvolume can be found admixed into mixed or conifer dominated stands, while only 13% of it isstanding in deciduous dominated forest types, accounting for 5% of the forest area. These stands,where birch is the prevailing species, are furthermore located close to open land types likeagricultural areas, urban sites or lakes. Another important result from the study demonstratesmoreover that there are huge differences within the county having a deciduous rich south and acomparable poor north‐east when it comes to broadleaved trees. Finally the simulation regarding anincreased deciduous share following the criteria concerned with deciduous trees in the new FSCstandard resulted in only minor differences in the forest production: the harvest possibilities and thestanding volume in the coming decades. The state of the indicators for biodiversity on the other handwas generally able to improve remarkably also pointing at deviations caused by the differentapproaches taken to reach the FSC target.
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